Tutor

Robbie Fulks is a country singer who taught Fey when she was a member of the Second City comedy troupe.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, but reared in North Carolina and Virginia, the country singer Robbie Fulks came to New York in 1980, to get off the farm (his parents were back-to-the-landers) and enroll at Columbia: “I didn’t know that there wouldn’t be women there, or even that it was in the Ivy League,” he said the other day. He dropped out after two years to give the singer-songwriter thing a go, while working as an assistant to Donald Fine, a publisher of mid-list thrillers. In 1983, he moved to Chicago, where, except for a three-year dalliance with Nashville (memorialized in his song “Fuck This Town”), he has lived ever since.

In the early nineties, he started making records on the Bloodshot label, often with the recording engineer Steve Albini. After nearly a dozen of them, he’s better loved than paid, and best (but not well enough) known not only for his guitar wizardry and his urbane honky-tonk wit but for his crafty country songs and his wicked sendups of such songs.

For a time, he also taught at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, on North Lincoln Avenue. One of the students in his Saturday-morning Guitar 1 for beginners class was Tina Fey, then a member of the Second City comedy troupe. She and her boyfriend (now husband), Jeff Richmond, often went to see him perform, and so he got to know them, but not too well. “I am loath to gurm acquaintances who achieve celebrity,” he said. (“Gurm” is a Nashville term for an invasively keen fan.)

Nonetheless, one morning earlier this month he found himself walking along Broadway, guitar case in hand, to pay Fey a visit at her offices in midtown, during a day of errands relating to the recent release of a new album, “Upland Stories.”

Fulks, who is tall and lean, sat down with Fey for office-machine coffee in a brainstorm room with a piano, a Lego model of a locomotive, and a whiteboard with garbage bags taped over it, to hide from prying eyes her notes for a forthcoming musical adaptation of her film “Mean Girls.”

“I took Robbie’s class on a whim,” Fey said. “I’m not musical. I was onstage at Second City, and I thought it would be helpful if I could play the ukulele or the guitar in one of the sketches, the one called ‘Grandma’s Records.’ ”

“That was a great sketch,” Fulks said.

video: Robbie Fulks performs “Alabama at Night”

“Dirty as all get out,” Fey said. “There was this guy, Jim Zulevic, who used to make up these songs that sounded like they were from the twenties.” The sketch involved a priest and some nuns going through a dead nun’s record collection to find something to play at her funeral.

Fulks imitated an old gramophone voice: “ ‘To describe your many charms would take a large thesaurus.’ And then the clitoris rhyme would be approaching.”

“And just before it came you’d turn the record off.”

Fulks imitated a retracted stylus: “Zrrrp.”

Fey went on, “The guitar lessons were a real scam, because Robbie would just sing for an hour, so we’d get a free show. ”

She went on, “I made it all the way up to an Elvis Costello class.”

“With who?” Fulks asked. “I can’t believe it wasn’t me.”

“That was where I Peter Principled myself. It was the far end of my skill set. Too many bar chords for me.”

Fey’s husband, a composer and musician, had recently bought her a small guitar, in the hope that she might take it up again. She fetched it from another part of the office. Fulks took it in hand and tapped the body. “What is this? Plywood?”

As he strummed lightly, talk turned, as it will, to their kids, and to contemporary taste—to Kesha and Dr. Luke. At one point, Fey knelt before Fulks, whose ringtone is music from “Laurel and Hardy” but who once made an album of Michael Jackson covers, to show him a new J. Lo video on her phone.

“Do your kids like country music?” she asked him.

“No, they hate it. It’s stained by my doing it. Well, my oldest kid, he’s thirty-two, he likes Buck Owens and all the stuff I like. My eighteen-year-old is a musician. He plays drums, a little guitar and bass. He’s at Bard. He has broad taste, which includes stuff I really don’t like, like jam-band music.”

After a while, Fulks was back on the street with his guitar, on his way to play it at a satellite-radio station. “When I lived here, I was at the mercy of the generation we are now, and trying to break in,” he said. “The sheen’s gone off the world, I find, at my age. I keep thinking of that Schopenhauer line about how when you’re young it’s like being halfway back in a theatre, looking at a beautiful backdrop. When you’re older, it’s like being two feet away.” ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.